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Robot Ethics: Mapping the Issues for a Mechanized World Artificial Intelligence 175 (2011) 942–949 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Artificial Intelligence www.elsevier.com/locate/artint CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by DigitalCommons@CalPolyRobot ethics: Mapping the issues for a mechanized world Patrick Lin KeithAbney George Bekey abstract As with other emerging technologies, advanced robotics brings with it new ethical and policy challenges. This paper will describe the flourishing role of robots in society—from security to sex—and survey the numerous ethical and social issues, which we locate in three broad categories: safety & errors, law & ethics, and social impact. We discuss many of these issues in greater detail in our forthcoming edited volume on robot ethics from Keywords: Robot MIT Press. Robotics Ethics Society Philosophy Psychology Law Policy Safety Error Bill Gates recently observed that “the emergence of the robotics industry ... is developing in much the same way that the computer business did 30 years ago” [18]. As a key architect of the computer industry, his prediction has special weight. In a few decades—or sooner, given exponential progress forecasted by Moore’s Law—robots in society will be as ubiquitous as computers are today, he believes; and we would be hard-pressed to find an expert who disagrees. But consider just a few of the challenges linked to computers in the last 30 years: They have displaced or severely threatened entire industries, for instance, typewriter manufacturing and sales by word-processing software, accountants by spreadsheets, artists by graphic-design programs, and many local businesses by Internet retailers. Customer-tracking websites, street-view maps, and the free and anonymous flow of information online still raise privacy concerns. The digital medium enables sharing that may infringe on copyright claims, and a largely unregulated process of registering domain names has led to charges of cybersquatting or trademark disputes. The effects of social networking and virtual reality on real-world relationships are still unclear, and cyberbullying is a new worry for parents. Internet addiction, especially to online gaming and pornography, continues to ruin real lives. Security efforts to protect corporate networks and personal computers require a massive educational campaign, not unlike safe-sex programs in the physical world. And so on. To be clear, these are not arguments that the computer industry should never have been developed, but only that its benefits need to be weighed against its negative effects. However, we are not interested in making such a cost-benefit evaluation here but would like to focus on an important lesson: If the evolution of the robotics industry is analogous to that of computers, then we can expect important social and ethical challenges to rise from robotics as well, and attending to them sooner rather than later will likely help mitigate those negative consequences. Society has long been concerned with the impact of robotics, even before the technology was viable. Beginning with the first time the word ‘robot’ was coined [13], most literary works about robots are cautionary tales about insufficient programming, emergent behavior, errors, and other issues that make robots unpredictable and potentially dangerous (e.g., [5,6,16,45]). In popular culture, films continue to dramatize and demonize robots, such as Metropolis, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator, AI, and I, Robot, to name just a few. Headlines today also stoke fears about robots wreaking havoc on the battlefield as well as financial trading markets, perhaps justifiably so (e.g., [19]). A loose band of scholars worldwide has been researching issues in robot ethics for some time (e.g., [42]). And a few reports and books are trickling into the marketplace (e.g., [43,26,38]). But there has not yet been a single, accessible resource that draws together such thinking on a wide range of issues, e.g., programming design, military affairs, law, privacy, religion, healthcare, sex, psychology, robot rights, and more. To fill that need, the authors of this paper are in the process of editing a collection of robot-ethics papers [28] for MIT Press, a leading publisher in robotics as well as ethics. In this journal paper, we will briefly introduce the major issues in robot ethics. 1. What is a robot? Let us start with a basic issue: What is a robot? Given society’s long fascination with robotics, it seems hardly worth asking the question, as the answer surely must be obvious. On the contrary, there is still a lack of consensus among roboticists on how they define the object of their craft. For instance, an intuitive definition could be that a robot is merely a computer with sensors and actuators that allow it to interact with the external world; however, any computer that is connected to a printer or can eject a CD might qualify as a robot under that definition, yet few roboticists would defend that implication. Certainly, artificial intelligence (AI) by itself can raise interesting issues, such as whether we ought to have humans in the loop more in critical systems, e.g., those controlling energy grids and making financial trades, lest we risk widespread blackouts and stock-market crashes [14,29]. But robots or embodied AI that can directly exert influence on the world seem to pose additional or special risks and ethical quandaries we want to distinguish here. A plausible definition, therefore, needs to be more precise and distinguish robots from mere computers and other devices. We do not presume we can resolve this great debate here, but it is important that we offer a working definition prior to laying out the landscape of current and predicted applications of robotics. In its most basic sense, we define “robot” as an engineered machine that senses, thinks, and acts: “Thus a robot must have sensors, processing ability that emulates some aspects of cognition, and actuators. Sensors are needed to obtain information from the environment. Reactive behaviors (like the stretch reflex in humans) do not require any deep cognitive ability, but on-board intelligence is necessary if the robot is to perform significant tasks autonomously, and actuation is needed to enable the robot to exert forces upon the environment. Generally, these forces will result in motion of the entire robot or one of its elements (such as an arm, a leg, or a wheel)” [9]. This definition does not imply that a robot must be electromechanical; it leaves open the possibility of biological robots, as well as virtual or software ones. But it does rule out as robots any fully remote-controlled machines, since those devices do not “think”, e.g., many animatronics and children’s toys. That is, most of these toys do not make decisions for themselves; they depend on human input or an outside actor. Rather, the generally accepted idea of a robot depends critically on the notion that it exhibits some degree of autonomy or can “think” for itself, making its own decisions to act upon the environment. Thus, the US Air Force’s Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), though mostly tele-operated by humans, makes some navigational decisions on its own and therefore would count as a robot. By the same definition, the following things are not robots: conventional landmines, toasters, adding machines, coffee makers, and other ordinary devices. As should be clear by now, the definition of “robot” also trades on the notion of “think”, another source of contention which we cannot fully engage here. By “think”, what we mean is that the machine is able to process information from sensors and other sources, such as an internal set of rules either programmed or learned, and to make some decisions autonomously. Of course, this definition merely postpones our task and invites another question: What does it mean for machines to have autonomy? If we may simply stipulate it here, we define “autonomy” in robots as the capacity to operate in the real-world environment without any form of external control, once the machine is activated and at least in some areas of operation, for extended periods of time [9]. Thus again, fully remote- or tele-operated machines would not count as autonomous, since they depend on external control; they cannot “think” and therefore cannot act for themselves. But what about the everyday desktop or laptop com­ puters: Are they autonomous? Doesn’t their programming count as human inputs or external control in some important sense? If so, how can robots ever be said to be free from external control, if all robots are computers (electromechanical or otherwise) at their core? These are all good questions that demand answers, for a complete discussion of what it means to be a robot. Many will engage other difficult issues from technical to philosophical, such as complexity, unpredictability, determinism, responsibility, and free will. As such, we cannot offer a complete discussion given space limitations of this paper, and we will have to content ourselves with the working definitions stipulated above—which should be enough to understand why we include some machines and not others in the following section. 2. Robots today and tomorrow Robots are often tasked to perform the “three Ds”, that is, jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. For instance, automo­ bile factory robots execute the same, repetitive assemblies over and over, with precision and without complaint; military surveillance UAVs patrol the skies for far more hours than a human pilot can endure at a time. Robots crawl around in dark sewers, inspecting pipes for leaks and cracks, as well as do the dirty work in our homes, such as vacuuming floors. Not afraid of danger, they also explore volcanoes and clean up contaminated sites, in addition to more popular service in defusing bombs and mediating hostage crises.
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